Freedom and Authority in Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” (Part 2)

In Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” two conceptions of communal health do battle. Dr. Stockmann’s is progressive, focused as it is on the vitality of the young, their new ideas, and the possibility of growth into a better future, even if that means encroaching on the powers that be. His brother’s is conservative, focused on the use of authority and ascetic self-restraint to preserve existing achievements and ideas. But once in conflict, these conceptions seem to reveal themselves to be competing forms of elitism, and expressions of contempt respectively for both past and future. Wes & Erin discuss whether there is a more nuanced conception of the common good available to us, and how it might be related to the sudden turn at the end of the play to the the role of education. 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We wanted to start out here in the second part of our conversation by talking about the moment where Dr. Stockman delivers the news about the pollution of the water to his family. So in the lead up to this, we get an interesting conversation after Petra comes in and talks about slaving away while they're having fun. 1:17 Erin: And poor Petra. 1:18 Wes: But then we get this talk of one of her younger brothers saying she must be sinful because work is punishment, and says he wants to be a Viking instead, but that would require becoming a pagan, which Billing endorses. And then Mrs. Stockman says, all right, time for bed. I don't want to. Don't want the kids to be corrupted by this. And Billings says, we'll all be pagans soon. And then the younger brother, Morten says, and then we can do exactly what we want. So we get these little hints about the dangers of the progressive point of view. Right? Which is that. And the rejection of the old values, which is that there are no new values. It's just nihilism. People can just do whatever they want. 2:03 Erin: Or you might become Wallace Stevens, something like that. 2:07 Wes: Take a little existentialist solution, maybe. But then, yeah, Petra complains a bit about the hypocrisy of school and having to teach kids things she doesn't believe, presumably religion. We'll find out later. She won't translate a story for the paper because it's too religious. So it's a kind of conversation you would expect among people of a progressive temperament, let's say. And then it's after that. But Stockman, who's been in his study with his letter that he finally received from Petra because she stole it from the mailman. He would have gotten it sooner if it weren't for her. He comes in with a letter, very excited, and he says, this news will get the town talking, believe me. Exclamation point. 2:53 Erin: And of course, that's the most important thing, is to make the masses talking. 2:58 Wes: Sorry, there's a lot of exclamation points for him. And he'll make a point of telling Aslaksen that. Don't take any exclamation points out of my. The thing you're publishing in the newspaper. Steve McQueen takes all the exclamation points out as far as I can tell. Maybe in fact add a few, heats up later. Yeah, right, yeah, add a few. 3:19 Erin: Yeah, that's a great funny line. 3:22 Wes: So then he says now let them come and say as always, that it's all some fanciful notion and the ideas of a madman. Right? So we know now that he's been accused of being a flake before and he wants to prove everyone wrong. And then he says, but they'll think twice. All right, Haha, they'll think twice, I'm sure. Sorry, I know this is very bad. 3:43 Erin: No, it's great, it's great. 3:45 Wes: And then he's wishing that the mayor were there and it says, it shows how we human beings go around passing judgment like the blindest of moles, which is a bit double edged. Right. He's think he's thinking of everyone, including himself there, that blindness of judgment. But in a way we really suspect that of course it's directed at the mayor and others who don't know as much as he does. Right. He comes at this from a position of real whether or not my skepticism about the report is warranted. It's not really skepticism about the report, it's more skepticism about his attitude, which is one of utter certainty. He's both at the level of the waters being polluted, but also for values. He is an absolute epistemic authority and he cannot be questioned. And so later on he'll say this thing. And he also delights in this reversal, in his discovery where fair is foul and foul is fair. This thing, the spa institute, that was the artery, the nerve center and billing chimes in and says the beating heart. Right, let's up the ante here. In reality, the entire spa is a cesspit. This thing that's supposed to be a source of health and life that we can later on will be obviously a metaphor for the existing norms, the existing values of society and a representative authority. This is a. He also calls it a poison sepulcher. There's so much delight in that that that's one of the interesting things about the play. It's not as Steve McQueen delivers it, just some very sober person who's obviously concerned about the well being of the community delivering the speech. It's someone who, Ibsen puts a lot of work into making his motives suspect or at least double, you know, multi determined. 5:43 Erin: Yeah, that's right. You know, going back a little ways in the same act, you know, Stockman says several times to his brother that he's he, that a man of Science ought to live in a little style or something like that. Like, he ranks himself with the top governor of the municipality or whatever the. Whatever the terminology might be. This idea, as we've already talked about in part one of this natural aristocracy is one, you know, which he seems to espouse. But it. It's related to this idea of expertise. He's the expert, and therefore we should. We should believe him. And he is so sure, because he's the expert. Like, there's. There's a little bit of a. There's a little bit of circular logic there. He's the doctor, so he can diagnose. And what gives him the authority to diagnose is that he's the doctor. He has this real grandiosity about himself. And then I love this idea of the blind as a mole thing that you're pointing to, because I hadn't noticed that before. And of course, it makes sense then that he would. He would take this authority upon himself as a doctor and related to this idea of being expert because he's the only one who can see it, right? We're all blind. But because he has, you know, gotten these microbes tested which are naked to our eyes, he knows he has the expertise and only he has the eyes to see what the problem is. I mean, I think you're right that he speaks generally of being like a mole. But now his eyes have been opened, and his job is to open other people's eyes and make sure that they take his expertise, his authority seriously. And then he. The first. I think this. This might be wrong, but one of the first, if not the first metaphors that he uses. You know, you talked about the. The cesspool and. And the. Or cesspit and sepulcher. But the way that he constructs that is he says this spa institute, which has been described as the town's artery, the town's nerve center and the devil knows what. And Billing cuts in and says, the beating heart of our town. I allowed myself once in a festive moment to. And he. Stockman cuts him off. Yes, that too. But do you know what it is in reality, this great, splendid, lauded spa institute that has cost so much money? Do you know what it is? The entire spa is a cesspit. And of course, he says this with great enthusiasm, but I think it's so key that the first thing he connects it to is a body. The spa is a body, and he's going to diagnose what's wrong with it. So if society is a body, if whatever it is that you're looking at is a body and you're a doctor, then of course you should be number one in town. Of course you should live like the governor. You know, you're better than the governor. You could see. You could see and diagnose what other people can't. It's so important to understanding. His grandiosity is this idea of himself as being expert in this way that no one else. He has a knowledge that no one else has access to. His delight in that discovery and that knowledge seems to be part of what's really feeding his mania in this moment. I love the note. Walking contentedly about, you know, he's like walking around the room, you know, going on and on about his great. You know, his great discovery. 8:58 Wes: Yeah. You would think. Right. Well, I've got some really bad news. Sit down. Right. Because this is going to hurt. No. Elated to deliver this news. And then. Right. And he thinks the university sample, you know, he said the samples he sent to the university for analysis, they prove there's, you know, decayed organic matter in the water infusoria, in vast quantities. It's seriously harmful to the health whether taken internally or externally. Yeah. Has the lab told him that as well? Did the lab draw that scientific conclusion about the harm? Right. Do we know that it really comes from the sludge? I think if I sent samples from my bathtub to the university, they might come back with some disturbing. 9:48 Erin: Right. As I took a drink of water 9:50 Wes: infusoria, we got a bunch of pasty bodies going into the water and bringing their own infusoria with them. Of course, there's decayed organic matter in the water. That scene in Caddyshack. Now I'm thinking of where Bill Murray finds a Baby Ruth in the pool. Everyone thinks it's these. Right. Not to be overly. Not to be gratuitously skeptical about this, but I think it fits in with the rest of the characterization of Stockman's elation and then his level of certainty about this, which we, at least as an audience, we don't get the picture that it's entirely warranted. Right. If Ibsen wanted to make sure that we were. That we knew that we should share Stockman's certainty. You know, maybe you could say this is like the third lab I sent it to. I wanted a second opinion. I did this. We could have gotten a lot more information about the samples being tested, but in particular about the scientific opinion that they are harmful whether taken internally or externally. Right. Because we could imagine that. Yeah. This is not water you would want to drink, but this is kind of water people bathe in. Yeah, pretty much. It could be something like that. So lots of little subtle hints here that I think are important. 11:07 Erin: Yeah, that's right. You know, one of the interesting elements of the Ray film from the 80s, and I think one of the ways in which he makes the doctor so straightforward is that there is actually a scene where he goes to. In this, it's the temple water which is contaminated. And so they have, like, all these pilgrims coming to the temple. And therefore, that's sort of how the. There's an interesting, like, faith element, you know, that comes in with that as well. Well, these are supposed to be healing waters. And how dare you say, you know, it's like saying that, you know, to put it in. In my terms of reference, you know, don't take the water at Lourdes. It's gonna make you sick. And it's like, well, how. How would it make you sick? It's supposed to be. It's supposed to heal. You actually did not do the reverse. Right. So you actually have a scene where the Stockman figure goes down to the temple and watches the pilgrims actually sip the water, like, throw it on their face, you know, hold it in their hands. And it's a moment of real power because you actually see people in the water, you know, like the spa. There's no sense that it even exists in this. This play. Right. I mean, of course it does, but, like, there's no real world sort of consequence, it seems. There's no scene that we get where we see people getting sick. There's no discussion, really interesting to have 12:27 Wes: a scene at the spa. 12:28 Erin: Yeah, right, right, exactly. Yeah. There's not. 12:30 Wes: The only location scene is at the printers. Yeah. 12:33 Erin: So it's so interesting that this symbology that the doctor is going to properly diagnose this town and heal this town from its problems, is actually so divorced from real bodies, the real consequences of this problem. And then by that same token, he's going to use his expertise to fix the problem, because he's going to give you, you know, he's going to write in his prescription pad. And as he says, we have to get the situation put right naturally. And Hovstad says, so that's possible. And Dr. Stockman says it has to be possible, otherwise the whole spa is unusable, ruined. But there's no need for alarm. I'm very clear about what needs doing, as you've already pointed out. And then he later says in his conversation with Aslaksen and Hovstad, when they're talking about using this as a political metaphor, he says, we don't need to go to all this trouble and get all these people to support us and all this other stuff because he says, I feel this matter should take care of itself. Now, I don't know if that means that he has such naivete that he thinks that just presenting his findings to the spa board will mean that it'll be solved internally or if he has some idea as to exactly how the infusoria can be killed, reduced. But the fact that he has this solution that he never ever expressly says. And then in that moment where he says the problem will take care of 13:57 Wes: itself except for moving the water pipes up higher. Right? 14:01 Erin: Moving the pipes. But isn't that really the idea that the. That the mayor gives to him? 14:06 Wes: No. I think so. It's in the. It's in the next. So after he says he's clear about what needs doing and then he's on about. He's going to tell. He wants Petra to tell the badger to tell Kiil about this because he thinks Kiil is gonna. Right. The badger sees him as a crack. As cracked in the head. The badger is gonna, you know, see that Stockman is not as cracked in the head as he thought. He's gonna have the report sent to. To the mayor. And then he says, he rubs his hands, right? As he imagines the. To do in the town, the controversy that this is going to create. Rubs his hands and then he says all the water pipes must be relayed and moved higher up. Right. It's like a physical version of revolution. There's no incremental or partial fix here. It's got to be redone. And in light of his competition with his brother. Right. Who gets the credit for this idea? Right. The mayor is very upset when people say that Stockman gets the credit. And like, well, I'm the one who did it. So you can see that. Likewise, Stockman is annoyed by the idea that the mayor is the only one who does things. And he did things the wrong way. He did things against his advice, and lo and behold, he did a little investigation to find out that they should have done it his way all along. And now it has to be redone according to his specifications. Very, very suspicious. But, yeah. Am I wrong about that? Did the mayor give him this idea? You're saying he might have given him this idea earlier? 15:44 Erin: I think you're right about that. Yeah. Because certainly he says, yes, all the water pipes must be relayed that's early. That's early enough that. Yes, this is his idea. And he says, I wrote opposing them when they were to start building, but back then nobody wanted to listen to me. Well, now I'll launch a broadside at them, believe me. Yes, I've written a report for the spa's board. I love the fact that he already wrote the report before getting the confirmation, too. That's key. It's been sitting here ready for a whole week. I've just been waiting for this. And now I'll go. It'll go off this instant. Look, four closely written pages. He holds it up and it's all scribbles, you know, 16:19 Wes: like. And stuff. 16:21 Erin: Right, Exactly. It's a total nonsense. 16:23 Wes: What do they call it? Someone just writes and writes and writes anyway. 16:26 Erin: Right, right. 16:28 Wes: Fia. Or something. Anyway. 16:30 Erin: But yeah, he. Well, you know, and, and, and to that point, I mean, when his brother sees the report before he meets with Stockman, he actually goes down to the engineer, or claims he does go down to the engineer to actually get an idea of the cost of this whole thing. So we have Stockman writing the report before he gets confirmation from the university. And then we have the mayor claiming that he doesn't believe the doctor. But then before he even goes to see. See him, has already gone down to the engineer to see how much this would cost. Which is an indication to me that. That the report must be. Must show something conclusive, you know, to give a little credit to the doctor. Right. That. That seems to me like something you would do only if you really thought that this wasn't bunk to go and see what. How it would actually be. How much it would actually cost to fix things. But there's. There's sort of mirror images in that way. I mean, just as you have. Just as you have Stockman, you know, referring to his expertise, referring to the town as the body, and he's the. He's the one that's going to fix everything. You also have the mayor taking on that kind. I mean, everyone is using this symbology, but the mayor says that he can't convince himself of the truth of Stockman's report. And he repeatedly uses. You know, I cannot get myself to believe this. I cannot convince myself. He repeatedly uses this odd sort of splitting language where he's splitting himself into two people. You know, there's him and then there's the little hostage inside him that refuses to believe that. That this report is true. And then subsequently after that, he. He. He refers to himself. He actually uses the Royal we for himself. And he says, I've been unable to persuade myself there is any actual imminent danger. And then he says, we consider it an unavoidable necessity that you make a public statement of the kind I have demanded. We as though, you know, he's more than one person. So he becomes the people in some strange way, he becomes the town. He takes on the entire town and even the spa himself, right? Like he wants to be known as being responsible for the spa. He wants to be the thing that people come to to right themselves. He wants to be the engine of economic stability for the town. So there were a few things too, that I won't be able to find now that indicated that he sort of identifies his person with the town. Of course, he's the mayor, so that would. That also stands to reason, but associates his person with the town and with the spa. And then the splitting seems to. It seems to suggest to me that he also is the people itself. And therefore Stockman's attempt to say that there's something wrong with the town or that there's something in the town's body that needs to be fixed or diagnosed pits them against each other in this crucial way. Like, I'm not sick. No, you are, and I'm going to heal you, you know. 19:15 Wes: And Stockman really misreads this at the end of the first act. And Petra says, what will the mayor think? Stockman says, surely he can't be anything but pleased at such a vital truth coming to light. And then they all have this big fantasy about how he's going to be the first man in the town and everyone's going to be celebrating him. They get induced by his mania, and they have this really unrealistic expectation of how people are going to react. And interestingly, at the beginning of Act 2, this question of how the mayor will respond comes up again, right? And Stockman gives a very different answer. So Mrs. Stockman asks him how he thinks the mayor will react. Stockman says he won't be pleased I made the discovery. I'm paraphrasing here, you know, he won't be pleased that it was I. I'm the one who made the discovery, not him. He's so damned afraid that anyone else might accomplish something for the good of the town. So we see that Stockman's kind of manic misreading of the mayor is corrected early on here. So now we get a series of other inducements. The first is Kiil the Badger, his wife's father, coming by. And Stockman had. Had the fantasy that Kiil would see that he wasn't cracked in the head because of his discovery. And of course that was a completely unrealistic expectation because Kiil doesn't believe in little Infusoria. I don't believe in your goddamn science and these supposed microbes. But Kiil is delighted by the fact that he's going to play monkey tricks on the mayor because he has a beef with the mayor. He was kicked. Kiil was kicked off the council, who, you know, they think they're so much clever than us oldies. And he even says, I'll give you some money. Press on with your monkey tricks. I'll give you some money. In a way you get the impression that Kiil is like, even his name sounds like he's the microbe, right? He's the creepy crawly one. Well, it's right after that that Hovstad wants to kind of expand the scope of this and will say it's not the swamp, but Mølledalen, that's critical. But it's the entire municipal life, right? Bureaucrats, authorities, stubborn bigots. And Stockman even defends them. He says, well, look, we need experts. And then Hovstad reminds him, well, they screwed up the laying of the water pipes and says putting it right will require press involvement. Early on, Stockman hadn't thought necessarily that they needed to give a lot of bad publicity and embarrass a lot of people in the way that Hovstad wants to do. And he hadn't yet had the idea that the toxicity comes from the swamp in which our entire municipal life stands rotting. That translation into the social sickness, from actual physical sickness to the social sickness for which the physical sickness becomes a metaphor, is created by Hovstad. And then you see Stockman get induced by that. And then Billing goes even farther with revolutionary talk. Stockman gets induced by that. It's Aslaksen who's sort of the undercurrent with the whole idea of doing what's prudent or temperate, staying with prudence and temperance. But the others drag him along into a more extreme position. 22:44 Erin: Right? I suppose the most generous reading of Stockman that we can give is just of a man who's so professorial and so delighted by science that he is, you know, an absent minded professor type, because what all of his behavior reveals is the fact that he has very little self knowledge, frankly, and of the way that he comes off and of the fact that he is so easily contaged by other people and also just very little understanding of people in general. You know, his wife is far savvier about knowing when to sort of kiss the mayor's behind a little. A little bit and making sure that he feels not so under attack. Whereas Stockman's just. Just totally unaware of his brother's feelings or aware of them, but only in the sense that he wants to play on them when he can and toy with his brother a bit. Had he an understanding of people, he would not, for instance, I mean, if he really thought this was something that could have just been taken care of by the Spa board behind closed doors, that none of this needed to get out, or the press didn't need to be involved, the homeowners association didn't need to be involved, then of course, the first thing he should not have done is open this report when he has members of the press in his house or any outsider in his house in a small Norwegian town that operates solely on gossip and then start parading around talking about how something needs to be done about it. If he had any understanding of people, he could have just gone to the Spa board, handled it privately. 24:10 Wes: These are the young people who are supposed to be the source of vitality, Right? 24:15 Erin: Right. 24:15 Wes: And he does, you know, he does find himself resisting Hovstad, as I've said. He defends the idea we need experts. And Hovstad said, these fine gentlemen can be dispensed with, speaking about the authorities. And Stockman says, dispensed with perhaps, but we still owe them a huge debt of gratitude, right? And you can read him as saying the same thing about values, right? The values that have been bequeathed to us. So Stockman is willing to try to be a bit. A bit moderate here. Hovstad presses the point. The myth of the infallibility of those who govern us must be shaken. Such notions must be eradicated like any other superstition. I think Stockman's going to use this word later on, right. In a speech that makes him sound a bit like Adolf Hitler in certain places with the eradication of vermin and the people become the vermin, as you pointed out, there's an element of naivete about getting elated about his new discovery. With the press present, he's not thinking about what they might want to do with it. And then, of course, Hovstad is thinking about his own importance, right? About. Well, really, it's the agent of change here is going to be the press, not necessarily Stockman in particular. So again, everyone wants in on it, right? 25:37 Erin: And ultimately what it comes down to is power, it seems, which is slightly different than money. But Money is a big part of it. I mean, Aslaksen, when he's talking to Stockman and is touting his position in the town, says, I come in contact with a lot of people and being known as a prudent and law abiding citizen, as you said yourself, Doctor, I have a certain influence in the town, a sort of modicum of power, I may say. And he brags that it would be a simple matter for me to get a petition together if it comes to the crunch. So it's really funny Aslaksen's position is the funniest. You know, I interpret Stockman's defense of expertise in that moment as being a kind of defense of himself. And in fact, he sees himself as the expert. And if he goes around saying that the regular people are. Need to rise up and depose the experts, well, that would include Stockman and it would include his brother. They must come from some wealth, some family wealth or something like that, even though Stockman is not doing so well for himself before the play starts and 26:39 Wes: has apparently been supported by the mayor. 26:41 Erin: Right, right. The brothers needed to set him up in this, in this job, but they must come from, from a pro, at least a prominent, if not a wealthy family in this town, because the brother's the mayor. He's a prominent doctor by the mayor's beneficence, it seems, but still. And so he's included in this, in this aristocracy. And so, so Hovstad seems to have this idea that he has power as a result of being associated with the press and being able to form public opinion and Aslaksen curiously has, has power masses, you know, because he understands the people and is one of them. And that gives him a power. He suggests, you know, he's, he's going to run a petition of thanks, for instance, for bringing this important public matter forward. And everything has to be done with temperance. So he's, he's like this, he gets his power from being so middle of the road that he's like right in the dead center of, of the people. And that somehow gives him, I mean, it does in practical effect give him a tremendous amount of power in this play. I mean, he's able to silence the doctor. I mean, partially because he's been made the arm of, of what the mayor wishes to do at the assembly, but still. 27:53 Wes: Right? I mean, yeah, Aslaksen will say, he wants to do a petition, but he. It should be composed with the proper temperance, so it doesn't upset the authorities. Hovstad tries to object, and Aslaksen jumps in and says, no, you know, there should can't be any disrespect towards the authorities, no opposition against the people with whom our lives are so closely bound. Not just closely bound, but in a way we stand on the shoulders of the authority of previous generations. If we're thinking about values, they are formative influences for us and we challenge them at our. In a sense, we want to challenge them, but they're so constitutive of our identity that it can feel in a way like self destruction to do so. And then when Aslaksen leaves, Hovstad slags him off. He's one of those in the swamp, right? Stockman defends him. Yep, but well meaning. And then Hovstad says again, the worship of authority must be eradicated in this town. This grossly inexcusable error with the water system system must be made apparent to every voting citizen. Stockman will go on to say, well, I think this is just going to go smoothly. I don't think it's going to really require this big conflict in the Hovstad. It's basically okay, yeah, we'll see. He wants a fight, he wants a fight. But yeah, as you pointed out with Aslaksen, we get someone who's in a kind of weird middle position where he's willing to challenge authority up to a point. Later on he'll say local, we can do it with the government, the national government, but local authority we have to be careful about because it's too dependent on local authority and we could end up with incompetent people if we just simply just have a revolution. So he's willing to be more rebellious at a more global and abstract level. But if there's going to be consequences to homeowners, that's another matter. 29:46 Erin: Right? And those consequences ultimately just come down to. Yeah, to lost income. Ultimately, it's about the town losing the economic opportunity that the spa represents and then showing up late to the party if they have to delay the SPAs running by two years while they fix the pipes. I think is the two years is the amount of time. And then in the meantime, that would give the surrounding seatowns a chance to catch up and to develop their own competing resorts. It's certainly a good point the mayor makes that that once this gets out, nobody's gonna wanna come to this town, whether it's whether the pipes are fixed or not. I mean, you know, I wouldn't specifically go to this spa town even if I had every assurance that it was no longer contaminated. With toxic sludge, I would probably choose a different resort. 30:34 Wes: So, yeah, you know, you gotta sympathize a bit, I think, with absolutely the practicalities of this. I mean, I would at least get a second opinion. 30:44 Erin: I mean, amity means friendship. And really, aren't we, aren't we trying to project a certain image here? 30:50 Wes: Isn't there a shark? Who knows? 30:53 Erin: Right, right. 30:54 Wes: You know, it could have been a propeller. It's like a tooth, you know, sticking out of the flesh. Well, what's this? I think it's a propeller. But anyway, yeah, it's. They get him worked up and then the mayor comes to him and says, yeah, you know, this is. I can't convince myself and you use strident language and it's going to cost a lot. And Stockman, who's been worked up by his buddies, by the youngsters, says he has the solid majority on his side, right? So he's got the idea that he'll have the people behind him and that's where they, you know, I guess when he's having his little fight with his brother, the mayor criticizes him for his compulsion to write on every topic. And Stockman says it's a duty for citizens to share ideas with the general public. And the mayor says the general public has no need whatsoever for new ideas. The public is best served by the good old accepted ideas it already has. Ultimately, the mayor will accuse him of, in blind obstinacy, cutting off the town's primary source of sustenance. So again, this idea that the town is made healthy economically by the existence of the spa. Stockman. The solid majority is on my side, the liberal minded press, blah, blah, blah. In act three, we get. I'm being a little synoptic here because we're running out of time, but in Act 3 we get billing involved. And now this word revolution is coming up. Billing says we'll go on striking blow after blow until the whole feudal elite come tumbling down. When I sat in here reading this, it was as though I glimpsed the revolution coming from afar. Then Stockman's fantasizing about writing more articles and, and in this very grandiose vein, tells Aslaksen he wants his manuscript treated like it's gold. No misprints. Right. All that quickly collapses. Of course, as we know, it doesn't take much. The mayor just has to come in and chat briefly with Aslaksen and Hovstad and Billing. They turn tail quickly and essentially betray Stockman. 33:04 Erin: Well, yeah, he says when he and his brother are having an argument, I have the Press in front of me and the, the solid majority behind me or whatever. Yeah. So he's, he's very quickly left pretty naked. I love this idea of that between the new and the old ideas. Everything is so abstract. I love the point in Act 4 when he finally gives the speech and he's going on about all these crusty old ideas. And finally someone in the crowd basically says, like, give me an example, you know, what, what are you even been talking about? Because so it's so funny that they've been talking in these grandiose terms or these rather just these abstract terms this whole time. And then, then finally he's enjoined upon to give an example. And basically the, the thing that he says is that regular people are idiots. That's his, that's his new idea. Or, or the, the old idea is that they're great and really, in fact it's a lie because regular people are dumb. That Stock Stockman's whole bag. 34:03 Wes: Yeah, yeah, it's amazing. I mean, so he's gagged at the meeting. He's not allowed to talk about the water supply. Right. The general will is against him. And it's the editor's obligation, Hovstad will say, to, I think to promote the welfare of like minded readers. He should be more concerned with his family and needy children. And so Stockman says, well, yeah, I don't need to talk about the quote unquote trifling matter of our water supply being poisoned, our spiritual wells are poisoned, and our entire civic community rests on a plague infested ground of lies. We get a lot of great speeches here. It'll start out with his eyes were open when he saw the idiocy of the authorities. They should be eradicated like any other vermin, which the people laugh at. That, that talks a bit about these old men with the world of dying ideas and that these dying ideas are the actual thing that are poisoning our spiritual wells. Hovstad says the majority always have the right on their side. That's when Stockman will say the majority, they never do because it's the intelligent who are the minority. And the stupid should not be ruling over the intelligent. Now we're getting kind of republican position. Right. They're right. Thinking of ultimately of Plato's Republic, where it's the philosopher kings who should rule. Or at the very least we should have representative government and the masses should not be directly ruling over us. I agree with that. 35:37 Erin: None of us want mob rule. That's right. 35:39 Wes: Right. But he'll say the right is with myself and a few other solitary individuals, the minority is always in the right. Sounding more and more Nietzsche, here I am thinking of the few, those individuals among us who have embraced all the new, vigorous truths. They stand at outposts, truths that are newly born into the world of conscious or too newly born into the world of consciousness to have gained majority support. In any case, I just wanted to get a few of these ideas. From the end of this, he gets more and more extreme, and then we'll start insulting the. The common people as well. So he moves from disdain for the authorities to disdain for their old values, and then finally to disdain for the common people. But as you point out, it's in response to a question about an example. Do you know where that. About give us an example of this. 36:35 Erin: Oh, it's actually Hovstad who asks for an example. Stockman saying, don't talk of certain truths. The truths that the masses, the public, approve, are truths that the fighters at the outpost held to be certain in our grandfather's day. You already remember. Read that. And then Hovstad says, instead of standing there talking up in the air like that, it would be amusing to hear what these marvelous old truths are that we all live on. And thank you, Hovstad. Finally, he proves himself to be an interesting newspaperman. And Stockman says, it's the doctrine you've inherited from your forefathers that you preach mindlessly far and wide. The doctrine that the common folk, the hordes, the masses are the nation's core, that it is the very people itself, that the common man, the ignorant and uncultivated men, member of society, has as much right to condemn or approve to govern and control as the few spiritually noble individuals. 37:21 Wes: Yeah. 37:21 Erin: So is that regular people are just stupid, you know, I wonder if there's a buzzfeed quiz you. You could take. Maybe that's an outdated reference, but I wonder if there's a buzzfeed quiz you could take. Like, am I a poodle human or a mongrel human? 37:36 Wes: Yeah, I love the contrast between poodle humans and mongrel humans, especially because poodle 37:41 Erin: just sounds so much worse. I mean, it's just a ridiculous word. And so to have it pop up in this, in this translation. I mean, maybe it sounds more dignified in Norwegian, but, yeah, if it's a 37:52 Wes: literal dog, I'd rather have a mutt. 37:53 Erin: Well, tell me about it. Like, first of all, they have, like, if we're actually comparing this to dogs, basically, like, any breed has so many physical problems that they are like, you know, genetic inbreeding. There's the Habsburg issue at the far extreme end, which he as a doctor should appreciate. 38:13 Wes: Right. 38:14 Erin: But the, you know, the end of Act 3 and going into Act 4, I just noticed, I just accidentally opened to this page. He says that he wants to see if lily livered cowardice has the power to muzzle the patriot who wants to cleanse society. And so yeah, so we have this idea of cleansing being so, so suggestive there. And yeah, I put in the margin, I just put Nazi. So them. Anyway, yeah. 38:40 Wes: And then yeah, he'll, he'll criticize like the sort of socialist pretensions of the newspaper, the. What is it called? 38:48 Erin: The People's Messenger. 38:49 Wes: The People's messenger, yeah. So he turns on the. Yeah, the socialist pretensions of these guys. And because Hovstad says, you know, he's proud to have his roots among the common folk that, you know, that are being insulted. And that's when Stockman turns to the idea. Well, it's not just, I'm not just talking about, you know, literally about lower class people. Right. The mayor is a commoner himself. So here's what he says. He thinks the thoughts of his superiors and believes what his superiors believe, people who do that are spiritual commoners. And then he criticizes the paper for this false doctrine that the solid majority are liberal minded and moral, whereas vice and spiritual depravity ooze out of high culture. So there's sort of an anti elitist cast to the paper that includes an anti elitism when it comes to high culture. And we can kind of see that right. In the religious story that Petra doesn't really want to translate. But they're like, well, we have to give the masses their opiate a little bit so that we can. Otherwise we can kind of settle them down so that we can feed them these truths about politics. 40:01 Erin: Yeah, that's such a great tautology ultimately. Right. Like even, even the People's messenger is in a way suggestive of this because it's such an anodyne name. It's suggestive on the one hand of a socialist paper, but on the other hand it's sort of kowtowing to, you know, it's, it's a, it's in service of what the people want to hear. We have to give the masses their opiate. We have to give them their silly little stories in order to placate them. And on the other hand, they are the only true authority. We have to have them rise up. You know, there's always this there's always this fascinating blend between talking down to your core demographic and believing that they're all secretly idiots. And also like wanting to, wanting to elevate them and put them in a position of power and give them all of this authority. It's like, which is it? Are you the, the messenger to the people or are you delivering the people the message they want to hear? 40:51 Wes: No. You know, and he also says it's not high culture that corrupts people and makes them right. Like an effete limousine liberal, to bring back a very dated phrase that was once used in our politics. But yeah, but it's the lower living condition you can romanticize. Well, people live in poverty and crappy conditions and they're the salt of the earth. But he says no, it's ignorance, poverty, ugly living conditions that do the devil's work. Like if an untidy house is bad for the soul and people lose the capacity to think or act morally. And here's another very Nietzsche phrase, lack of oxygen debilitates the conscience. Right? You got to air the house out. So when he's called the enemy of the people, yeah, he's made himself the enemy of the people, right. 41:42 Erin: In the end, he makes himself the Antichrist. 41:46 Wes: There's an equivocation there. There's enemy of the people in the sense of someone opposed to their well being, and then there's enemy of the people in the sense of someone who has their well being in mind but is willing to slag them off, is willing not to flatter their sense of worth, insult them, maybe tell a little bit of the truth about them. And this is an annoying. It's hard not to. Maybe this is a bad thing to admit, but to enjoy a lot of this, because a lot of political life involves this sort of pandering, right? You pander to the masses and oh, you're the salt of the earth and you're the best and society ought to be run by you and no society ought to be run by the elites, the experts, the people who know better. And yeah, they suck too, in their own way. But the elitist in me sympathizes with these sorts of tirades. But of course they. He goes too far. So, yeah. So what do we make of him at the end of this? Well, I guess there's a new note at the very end when he turns to the idea of staying and fighting it out and being an educator. Right. That again, is the more positive spin on this, right? 42:58 Erin: No, but I take that final burst of loquaciousness from him at the end of the play to be evidence of his insanity. He's finally just lost it. Yeah, okay. 43:09 Wes: To me, it's ambiguous. Right. And the rest of them seem kind of pleased with him. You know, Petra grabs his hands. Mrs. Stockman is smiling and shaking her head. Oh, here he goes again. 43:22 Erin: Well, they've all been, you know, these 43:24 Wes: poor people are one of his harebrained schemes. And it's like everything's going to be. It's a comedic ending and everything's. Is everything going to be fine? Have they been through this before? His hair brain scheme goes wrong. Maybe moving up north was one of those schemes, but he always lands on his feet. You don't know whether if this were a more serious ending than the turn towards the possibility of educating people, including street urchins. You could take that seriously and say, okay, well, he's climbed down off his elitist pedestal. He's calmed down, and now he has a more realistic idea of what he can do that's constructive in this context. But yeah, as you point out, we kind of don't know because it seems like he just could just be crazy and that this is an entirely unrealistic plan that he has. 44:15 Erin: It seems like one more manic outburst, you know, oh, now I'm going to throw all this away. And now I'm going to. Now I'm going to homeschool, which is always a bad sign. No, I'm joking. I could say that I was homeschooling schooled. 44:33 Wes: Someone is homeschooled. 44:34 Erin: You know, everyone is bad. Now I just have to start my own school. And I'm going to say, you know, this is like one step away from being like, I, you know what? I'm going to. I'm going to form my own country where only smart people will be allowed 44:45 Wes: to come in, you know, start a cult. 44:47 Erin: Yeah, exactly. 44:48 Wes: Starting with the street urchins and. 44:50 Erin: Exactly, exactly. Of course, you know, everything that starts that way ends with Stockman drinking hemlock. But. 44:59 Wes: Or a bunch of people drinking Kool Aid. 45:02 Erin: Or a bunch of people drinking Kool Aid. That's right. 45:05 Wes: Which he is good at making people drink the proverbial Kool aid and getting them excited. 45:10 Erin: Is he. 45:12 Wes: The reaction to Mrs. Stockman is odd, right? Smiling and shaking her head. Oh, Tomas, no, He's just ruined their lives and now they're going to do this wildly risky thing. It's not, it's not like the end of a sitcom episode. Oh, there you go again. You know that that's not really what the moment calls for. 45:33 Erin: Could you imagine this sitcom where every single setup was like a, like a five act, you know, it's like a three hour episode where the end is like just another hare brain scheme in the life of Dr. Thomas. 45:45 Wes: Did I do that? 45:48 Erin: The next episode he starts his school and like there's an outbreak of lice and he. I don't know. 45:53 Wes: Anyway, he's like chastising the kids. You're the vermin. 46:03 Erin: No, no, but I think like, you know, Mrs. Stockman flip flops too, in the, in the play, but only because I think she's seen. Only because she sees him go through so much betrayal at the end that she's finally convinced to stand by him. Right. So, yeah, so in the end, maybe, maybe she's the one who's also gone nuts and just is like, oh, here he goes again. Because the only way she can, she can survive in this life is to just treat everything he does like some cute little flight of fancy. 46:32 Wes: Yep. And I just, you know, I think, you know, as we end, as we close here, it's just. Yet my impression is that we are, as an audience, we're left in a state of doubt where. Doubt about Stockman's credibility when it comes to the report, doubt about whether he's about to launch a more constructive enterprise or whether he's just crazy. Ibsen is not giving us an easy identification with a heroic protagonist here. It's something much more subtle and unresolved in a way. 47:09 Erin: That's right. And though I don't think this is such a. This is as great an example of this kind of phenomenon in Ibsen as, say, A Doll's House. One of the things I really love about Ibsen is that the plays always end at a moment which is not an ending so much as a threshold. So we can imagine. You know, Doll's House is like. People have written about the fact that that whole play could just be the prequel to whatever the real story of Nora's life is going to be. Right. She stands. I mean, at the end she closes, closes the door, but in so doing, she stands on the precipice of an entirely new life. And a great drama could be made out of whatever happens to her when she leaves that house. You know, maybe she goes right back in and the whole drama is moot. 47:49 Wes: But. 47:49 Erin: Right, but, but one can imagine any number of things which might happen to her after that. And I think this is not so extreme an example, but it's something of the same, Same idea here. I think this is true. The majority, if not all, of Ibsen's plays. You know what? But we could imagine a play starting right at the end of this one. Okay, this guy is hated by everybody in the community and he's cast out. What does he do? You know, it seems like the moment that Ibsen selects for the drama of his plays is always so well selected but also so resonant that one could imagine he could have chosen a different dramatic moment later on and it had been just as. Just as successful anyway. He's just these. He's such a genius. Just the mayor complaining about indigestion in the first moments of us seeing him. And it's like, Right, it's all about acid and clogged pipes. Here we go. You know, everything is so perfect anyway. 48:45 Wes: Yeah, okay. I think that's a good place to end it. Of course, there's always the next adventure that comes after this and ending, which is a movie. 48:58 Erin: And tbd. Thank you, tbd.